Cities: Skylines

Tuco_sl said:

I want to play this, but only if I hear it has good and challenging gameplay. If my city isn't a pile of shit that goes bankrupt and I get lynched the first 3+ times I try to make it, then it's not enjoyable for me.

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Honestly, it's pretty forgiving once you figure out traffic, that's the main hurdle. It's hard to flat-out ruin your city to the point of no return. Now, I abandoned a lot of cities because after a few hours in I realized my city was horribly inefficient and it would be too much work to bulldoze and fix everything, so I just started over with my new-found knowledge and plan. Did that several times.

I also had a huge issue with trash in my cities

To be clear, I definitely feel like I got my money's worth out of the game. No question there. It just felt like the game could have been better. As it stands, I built up a few cities to 100k+, got bored trying to fuck around with traffic/transit, and haven't picked it up since.

So I've been modding this quite a bit and with the dynamic internal resolution, post-fx and other graphics mods the game looks tons better than simcity.

More importantly it's edging towards a really complex economic simulation. Which makes it crack for me.

I need some consolidated mod packs or something. I keep going to the community downloads area and then losing my mind/getting bored looking at mods.

traffic is the endgame in these types of games, and I'd really like the game to help me out a bit more with that. I just sit there fucking myself in circles with traffic problems as my city grows. I think the traffic problems themselves should massively slow down growth and give you a kind of choke control over growth rather than just vicious circle slamming you into the mat WWE style.

I've found you need to balance the size of the "communities" to about 1/3rd of a map for res/com and no more than 1/4th of the map for industrial areas. If industrial zones grow too large they have a cascading effect on the surrounding traffic and the minute demand shifts just a little it can turn the whole city to shit without letting you know why.

The model is actual very clever. For example if you get a bad garbage collection day, it can hang up factory deliveries just long enough that your commercial zones start IMPORTING instead... that then pushes your industrials to EXPORT instead of selling locally, and you have a clusterfuck of incoming traffic without knowing it.

It's worthwhile reading up on the logistics model in the game if you're still playing it. At around 100k pop, it gets really hard to balance a vertically-integrated economy without really expensive dedicated highways/rail systems. So it really just goes back to restraining the growth of your dedicated "areas" so that their traffic never overwhelms their neighbors.

Anyone get the after dark expansion know if it breaks the graphics mods? Hopefully it doesn't break all the custom assets I made.

Someone said on the stream review the day/night cycle is free just the additional content (crime, leisure) is paid.

Yeah the crime changes are exciting. That was actually a weird bug in their economic model though, I kinda noticed it and stopped building police for coverage (just the big precincts for happiness).

Basically the poor folks MOVE OUT of the city long before turning to crime. There wasn't anything that reduced wealth "suddenly" enough that they'd go straight from unemployed to crime without leaving the city first. Unlike say health where a clogged sewer pipe can get them from sick to dead before they move out of town. So crime ended up being expressed as a demographic hit instead of aggregate demand hit.

Sale on this and other paradox titles going on, lasts through tomorrow at some time.

Paradox Weekend 2015

A lot of the negative reviews I was reading was it doesn't really challenge you like Sim City used to with natural disasters and random crap like that, it's just a sandbox so it limits replayability. Is that a fair criticism or should I pick this up on sale?

It's definitely much more of a city building/management game than simcity. There are no disasters at all, but you can very easily start a failure cascade that depopulates your city in fairly short order. There is plenty of "conflict" in managing your city's growth though. The economic model is pretty sophisticated, but it's realistic enough that the transit/traffic system is actually the most direct way the player can influence the economy.

It really comes down to how much you enjoy building the most efficient road systems possible tho lol... I can blow through hours optimizing an interchange just so I can shut down an extra police station. I'm weird.

I actually sat down and built this thing ingame (nowhere near as pretty but fuck yeah it did the job):

Palum_sl said:

A lot of the negative reviews I was reading was it doesn't really challenge you like Sim City used to with natural disasters and random crap like that, it's just a sandbox so it limits replayability. Is that a fair criticism or should I pick this up on sale?

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I personally shut down disasters when I played 2k so this is basically a deeper version of 2k for me. The real challenge generally lies in traffic or public service.

It's fun and for the price you can't really go wrong. But I'd agree that if you don't get a boner designing interchanges and subway lines, it gets boring fairly quickly. I made it to about 30-40 hours and I was just kind of done with it. Definitely the best traditional city builder since SimCity 4.